Q Report: World War 3

 

To: Agents, Anons, Global Weirdoes. 

From: Q (K00)

Re: World War 3

All, 

We talk about the battle between artists and AI in these well intentioned stances, but very few people can do a single thing without the input of a robot or two. This is pure human. Right here? This stuff? This terse, overly verbose prose? This is coming right at you from inside this awful skeleton prison my conscious mind has found itself trapped within. 100% human. Say whatever you will about this savage nightmare journey; it has been interesting. If you can find the means with which to alter your perspective of this world, towards a detached and absurd understanding of events thus far, you can see it all playing out like the most hilariously specific joke ever conceived or pulled off. Maybe that’s all this really is, and if so, that’s OK. As long as there’s a reasonable plan in place, to stick the punch line. 

The thing with my existence is having all of this information and nowhere to go with it. Nowhere reasonable. There isn’t time, kids. To develop a lot of these things out to their logical conclusion. I’d be lucky to carve out a couple years for a doctorate, but it’s all too much trying to keep our heads above water. Above the rising tide. When if I could just explain myself accurately, truthfully, and with enough gusto to overcome the white noise? Virility. The only thing capable of penetrating the consumerist white noise is to convince it to harmonize with your message. Very few people or organizations have figured out how to do it yet. If they could, they would have control of a nightmarishly powerful tool. 

The other thing, about being me, are these truths and nowhere to go with them. I know there is a God. I know there is an afterlife. But trying to explain this knowledge is only going to discourage and embarrass us. I will get weepy and have to take breaks. You will not be able to maintain eye contact. The entire thing is going to make you uncertain about my sanity, hopefully yours too, and we will only continue to orbit farther and farther away from one another, desperately flailing towards any means of salvation. Like, the knowledge isn’t deep, you know. Yes, God, but who the hell knows what their plan is, if any? That’s where knowledge ends and personal belief can only hope and theorize. 

It’s probably humanity that has ruined a functional relationship with God, over the course of the years. People unable to prevent their own agendas from influencing the course of events. Or doing things in the name of God that are quite clearly not something they would endorse. There’s thousands of years of hard won experience, doing things clearly opposite from the will of a just and loving God, probably perpetrated because it doesn't seem like God is intervening to the opposite? 

“God, if you DON’T want me to torture this person… just try and stop me!”

If you read about the saints, this Saint Peregrine had angels come down and prevent the fire from wounding him, so they beat him to death with clubs instead. Which, on the one hand, that’s a rough work around of God’s will, but on the other you know that your creator is waiting on the other side to catch you. Someone is going to catch you, on the other side. I’m not sure who or what that thing is, but I hope it’s God and they have all my loved ones waiting there too. But maybe it will also be the version of me that is the Time Messiah?

It’s World War 3 and there’s no way I’m going quietly, is what this whole thing is about. Why we’ve gotten this far along in the stream. So very many people out there are just trying to live their regular lives and clock in and out of World War 3. At some point in this process I finally felt a level of understanding with Germans of the 1930s, how if you just keep your head down and focus on work, you may survive? There is no way that you can impact the war machine, and to try and interrupt it is to be tortured and then sacrificed to it. That’s what the war machine does, people. It grinds humans into money. It is not a conversion that comes without pain and chaos, but pain and chaos is the point for some people. Some tragically broken people we have somehow placed in charge. 

There are people who might call this fatalism. There are think tanks and defense contractors and sweating company men in rolled sleeves who sit around polished tables explaining that escalation is regrettable but necessary, and that necessity, like God, always seems to show up wearing an expensive tie and asking for more dead children. That is how they talk when they want to turn a crater into a quarterly objective. That is how the machine launders blood into PowerPoint. Somewhere tonight a man in a secure room is moving little glowing symbols across a map and calling it stability, while somewhere else a mother is trying to identify a leg in a ditch by the shoe. This is what they mean by strategic posture. This is what we mean by damnation with branding. Every empire eventually becomes a customer service line for the apocalypse, and ours has the worst hold music. Cotton Eyed Joe on repeat. Forever.

Nobody wants to believe they are living through the opening crawl of the stupidest extinction event in history. They want to believe it’s an aberration, a flare-up, a regional concern, a thing over there with chyrons. Meanwhile the sky fills up with drones like weaponized locusts, and the sea becomes a trolling ground for floating thermonuclear leviathans, and every nation on Earth starts rummaging through its old grudges like a drunk uncle looking for a misplaced revolver in the hall closet. It is all so preventable that it becomes hilarious. The absurdity may in fact be part of some sinister plan, but I think it’s more likely a bet. Will an intelligence given the capacity to love itself ultimately destroy itself, if given the gift of communication and free will? Probably. It’s not looking good, Bob.

Still, people go to work. They pack 3 lunches no one eats. They answer the emails. They apologize for delayed replies while satellites line up targets overhead. There is something noble in it, this compulsive commitment to normalcy while history froths at the mouth in the driveway. We have all become part-time extras in a disaster film we were assured was prestige content. You pick up cough syrup for the kids, make a grocery run, doomscroll a little, maybe read that another city has been converted into dust, another school closed, and then you remember to thaw the chicken. There is no recognition for this. There should be something. A small statue of someone in comprehension of the atrocities staring into the middle distance while not screaming.

The war machine loves this about us. Loves our endurance. Loves our adaptability. Loves that we can get used to anything short of our own immediate death, and even then only because the paperwork becomes someone else’s problem. Different insurance claim. It counts on our ability to metabolize horror in manageable doses. A school here. A hospital there. A thousand bodies filtered through the gauze of official language until they become “casualty figures” and “kinetic outcomes” and “complex regional developments.” Every victim gets translated into a noun too boring to stop a budget vote. That is the genius of the age, not merely killing people, but also killing language so that nobody can describe the event honestly enough to change anything. It is difficult to organize a moral response when every atrocity comes pre-softened by a sanitized press release. The free press is dead, like disco. At least here and now it is.

Beneath it all, under the polished euphemism and patriotic yelling and solemn nodding from those who have never had dirt kicked into their open wounds, there remains a simple filthy truth: some horrible people love this. They love the clarity of enemies. They love the economic stimulant of ruin. They love the chance to drape themselves in flags while lighting the match. These are not villains. These are not masterminds. These are spiritually concussed toddlers in expensive shoes, smashing continents together because they mistook dominance for control. Give a broken person enough authority and eventually they will try to make their interior emptiness everyone else’s logistical challenge. That is foreign policy now. The culminated, toxified, weaponized mental health issues we continue to ignore, armed with a nuclear triad.

I do not say this as a saint floating six inches above the mud. I say this as one trapped in the collapsing funhouse of the Broken American Dream, processing data and grief and rage until the mixture explodes into overlong blog posts. Be aware that some violence is necessary in the defense of life. If a person breaks into your home with murder in their heart, you have a right to protect yourself and those you love. But there is a difference between defense and murder, between tragedy and industry, between the sorrowful necessity of force and the mass profit empires amass from using it. We crossed that line so long ago we built toll booths on it. We monetized the crossing. We sold commemorative shirts. It’s been memed.

This is why World War 3 feels less like a declaration and more like a subscription service. Automatic renewal. No opt-out. No human being alive asked for this package, but here it is bundled with inflation, fascism, algorithmic brain rot, ecological collapse, and a free seven-day trial of spiritual decay. Somewhere there is a coupon code for Armageddon Plus. Somewhere defense lobbyists explain that mushroom clouds are a jobs program. Somewhere a senator is squinting at a casualty estimate and trying to decide whether it will hurt fundraising in the purple suburbs. We are ruled, in no small part, by people who would watch the heavens split open and ask only whether the event polls well among independents.

There is still a joke in it and the joke is us. Not in the sense that humanity is funny, but in the older and holier sense that we are absurd. We strut around in neckties and uniforms and priest collars and branded fleece vests pretending we are not hairless panic-apes on a wet rock hurling metals at one another because our dead fathers taught us that lines on maps are sacred. We say things like deterrence and sovereignty and strategic patience while our species remains one bad week away from clubbing itself into legend. Einstein said the next one would be fought with sticks and stones and kids, at this rate we’ll be lucky if there are enough sticks to go around. May just have to stick with stones and do the best we can. We are out here threatening one another with total civilizational collapse while still unable to zipper merge. My current distance from the zipper merge determines my highly variable ability to enjoy life. That has to count for something in the cosmic ledger.

No, I will not go quietly. Not because I imagine I can halt the machine alone, but because a person ought to object when humanity is being fed into the furnace by accountants. A person ought to say, with whatever breath and vulgarity and trembling humor they have left, that this is unacceptable and obscene. The children deserve better. That the victims deserve better. The survivors deserve better. The whole shabby miracle of being alive on Earth deserves better than to be auctioned off piecemeal to oil ghouls, bomb merchants, lying patriots, and frightened would-be kings. If this is the time we have been handed, then let the record show that at least one skeleton prison rattled its cage and loudly raged against the dying of the light. Trying to warn others that it wasn’t too late to fight back. That they only win when we all surrender to it.

1∞💗

Q